The grimoire is finally available on Kindle at the Amazon store. It took a lot longer to get to Amazon because the file previewed very differently on the Kindle devices than it did in the Kindle app. Amazon’s only suggestion was to recreate the whole thing as a Word file, which wasn’t something I was prepared to do.

A few formatting problems slipped through the cracks even in the iBook version, so it isn’t perfect. But the text is still readable and the 5.99 you spend will save you a lot on mojo costs down the road. You will also be able to find the best information in the posts as of July 1 without having to search through the archives. The information is as current as possible as well.

Please buy the book and buy copies for your friends. It will help keep the blog afloat. Most important, please give review the book on iBooks and Amazon. Even if you don’t love it, the reviews help.

But what’s not to love?

Residential tips

There are so many residences now that you should take the time to consider which actually deliver the most value to your kingdom. You should consider three factors:

Cost

Overall return

Space consumed

Overall return makes more sense than picking coins over experience since both will add up quickly. You also want to consider cost to return, especially hourly return. If you don’t intend to check in more than a couple of times a day, residences may not be your best buy since they mature hourly.

You should also look for items that take less space. The Chinese residences take less space than the Japanese, for instance. When you can only pack 50 to a realm, however, this may be less important than with residences such as the Bird and Creepy residence, which seem to have unlimited placement. When you have to choose between the bird residences that can be packed tightly together, and the more expensive orcs that take far more space, the bird residences become the far wiser investment.

Fortunately, ngmoco:) scales the number of residences available with your level. This allows you to increase your investments with your ability to spend.

As you can see, the orc residences, which cost 10000c more than the birds, cannot be packed together as tightly. Since the overall return is the same (350hcp) you will produce a higher yield per realm by packing it with bird residences.

I noticed a disturbing trend in one of my realms recently. Time and time again the harvest orb wanted to know if I would complete 666 harvests.

If you saw this often enough, wouldn’t you consider it to be an omen? I mean, this number, of all numbers, the mother of all symbolic numbers. I found it truly disturbing.

If you don’t know the significance of 666….Well, how could you not know and still live in the 21st Century? After all, we see the number in every Omen movie and just about every other episode of Supernatural. We had a president with six letters in all three names only 30 years ago, and a second whose name would have spelled “666” if he was smart enough to spell.

I knew what it signified. The coming of the Antirule. The time when We Rule would be overcome by deadly corporate interests who would replace medieval whimsy with cheap commercial greed.

I showed my findings to Carol. I asked her if this could be the end of We Rule as we know it. She said, “Add another building.”

And that’s how I saved the world of We Rule. I now have 667 buildings to harvest. Crisis averted. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

Hail Odin statue

A reader asked me to do an analysis of statues, which was timely since I had planned to do one anyway. Glad to know I’m in synch with my audience.

Most statues in We Rule are mere ornamentation, but a few deliver coins and experience. Several, such as the Ganesh statues, are gifts and can only be acquired by the luck of the draw. I included them in the Idle Income charts. But a couple can be purchased and deserve a closer look.

Just because a statue earns, doesn’t mean you should install it for income. The stone bull pillar, which costs 18000c, returns a lousy 20hcp. You’re far better off with just about anything if you want a serious return on your investment.

Odin’s statue, on the other hand, returns 183hcp every 18 hours and takes up about the same space as a grove. This is three times the return of a Poseidon fount for only twice the price (180000c). The Persian lion only costs 60000c and returns almost 90hcp every 20 hours. This is two thirds of the cost of a fount with half again the return. The Khmer Lion turns around every six hours at 120hcp for 80000c.

Odin’s statue is the newest in a series of high return statues that become available around L40. Statues tend to take up less space than other items, which can increase their value. The persian lions are minuscule compared to Odin.

So far the statues are luxury buys, which may be why they are available only at higher levels. They also tend to be limited to a few dozen per realm, which means you can’t plant as many. Players should concentrate on groves and residences first, but once you realize you are making enough to buy one or two a day (and not per week) it would be a good time to start adding a few.

As always, you shouldn’t worry about the initial investment cost. Higher priced items may take longer to pay off, but once they are paid off the performance return makes them far more valuable.

What’s up with Egypt? I know their president is in deep caca right now, but is that any excuse to get rid of the Egypt content that’s only been out a week? That’s pretty quick, even for ngmoco:).

It’s not like any of the content was politically sensitive. No references to Moslems or Coptic Christians. It seems pretty tame to me.

Nor were they clear about which content they’re removing today. Is it just the Cleopatra’s palace and Pharaoh’s temple or is it all of the new content? Even though I’m not doing anything with it now, I bought lots of palm trees, oases and sand. Then I decided to keep the oases for now because they do make money.

I had planned to convert my east kingdom to something Mediterranean but I wanted the weather to warm up a little. So I bought stuff just for storage until then. Which is probably what they’re counting on.

These are the new oases. They deliver a high number of coins and xp per hour. Or do they? We’ll consider that below.

Click image to see full size

In the past I’ve said they need sand tiles. Cool that we got them. Maybe in the fall we’ll get fallen leaf tiles and autumn colored trees like the maples in We City.

New levels to come?

I am so pleased that ngmoco:) has added 20 additional levels with buildings to We Rule since I started playing. The black dragon at L50 will allow them to add more high level buildings in the void between L40 and L50.

In the meantime, I find myself thinking ahead to L60. We have a purple, red and black dragon. Now we need a fire breathing dragon. It can’t be that hard. The comic characters in We City control their flights with bursts of fire.

What would be really cool would be a building that bursts into flames when the fire breathing dragon flies over.

We’ve discussed churches or cathedrals in the past, and I also think a gothic cathedral would be a great addition to the game, as tall if not taller then the three castles. It could have a vat of boiling lead on top that tips over and spills every once in a while. Quasimodo could be the character.

And while we’re at it, why does We City get Stonehenge when We Rule doesn’t? I think we should get Stonehenge and maybe even Avebury and The Ring of Brodgar, complete with a sacrificial altar, druids and forest gods. Hell, let’s bring in Asgard and the ring cycle and add Gladsheim, Vingólf and the Well of Urd. Toss in some Valkyries and we’re good to go.

In fact, as long as we’re doing Egypt, let’s add Lake Victoria and the Nile. Let’s do the Mayan and Aztec monuments as well. Then we can change the game’s name to We World Geography. We could then add Angkor Wat and Angkor Tom. And the Parthenon and Coliseum, not to mention a Labyrinth with a minotaur. How about grape groves with a dancing Dionysus?

Please, however, please please, no aliens or space ships. Or cartoon superheroes. We could use a sea monster for the lakes, as that would be far more appropriate to We Rule than We City, but no aliens, space ships or superheroes.

There are still so many real medieval items left that ngmoco:) really doesn’t need to stray off theme. In addition to the cathedral, how about:

A round table with a knight?

A goblin’s cave?

Now that I think of it, Asgard items are a lot closer to a medieval motif than some of the other stuff (especially since we have Vikings). Let’s have those. (So are the henges. We really could add two or three of those.)

A gallows?

A wood-block press shop to print broadsheets?

A monastery with monks?

A convent with nuns?

The tower of the Holy Grail?

An ogre’s lair? Disney can sue you for using Shrek but not generic ogres.

A brothel?

Shrines with relics?

A dungeon?

A torture chamber?

A haunted forest?

Sherwood forest tree with Robin Hood?

Pixie Hollows with real fairies this time?

Oh, yes, and finally: Wouldn’t it be great if ngmoco:) added inventory capabilities to all of their games? And more islands to Adventure Bay?

Idle income

The oases are the newest addition to the idle income producing products, joining the groves, founts and troll bridges. The founts and bridges are buildings technically, but they really don’t return enough to customers to make them worth ordering.

(I’m stressing the last bit because people still keep ordering my trolls when I have black dragons, Olympus mounts, chimeras and chateaus in other realms. This puzzles me. Players are free to order anything in my kingdom, and I am loath to be like the salesmen who steer customers to higher end products, but in this case the higher end products are worth more. Not only that, they cost players nothing—unlike Trade Nations where players have to pay for their purchases.)

So I thought I’d crunch the numbers to see which of the idle-income properties are most valuable. I’m including space taken into account because if a property returns four times as much income but takes up five times as much space, you might want to go with the smaller items.

Compare the grove and oases areas. Both are stacked, but a lot more groves can be stacked into the same area.

Click image to see full size

Item

Cost

Lvl

Hrs

c

c/Hr

Xp

Xp/Hr

Space

Orange

3000

15

6

5

0.8

50

8.3

1

Ruby

10000

23

6

100

16.7

85

14.2

1

Diamond

100000

27

6

150

25.0

105

17.5

1

Oasis*

100000

0

12

320

26.7

515

42.9

4

Sleigh†

7000

4

1

0.3

100

25.0

Fount

90000

18

6

125

20.8

240

40.0

1

Troll Bridge

70000

14

8

15

1.8

175

21.8

.5

It’s hard to say which of the income generating properties make the most sense. On an hourly basis the oasis outperforms the ruby grove three to one in experience and slightly more than 50 percent better in coins. It outperforms the diamond by 2.5 times in xp and only has a slight advantage in coins. The oasis ouperforms thefount by 25 percent in coins and only a fraction in experience.

Here’s where other considerations come into play.

You can fit approximatley four founts or groves into the space of one oasis The numbers will even out the more you plant.. When I try to stack them, I can fit even more groves into the same space and slighly fewer founts. The founts are slightly cheaper and the ruby groves cost ten percent as much (10000 v 100000c).

For high level players, with coins to burn, I would say it’s pretty much a wash. Make use of them all. But if you’re building your kingdom and pushing to reach L30 (and even 40), go with the rubies. The combined cost reduction and return for space make them a far better bargain. Drop an oasis in if you want the decoration (the first one’s free for finishing the quest), You will actually get a higher return in approximately the same space for about 40 percent of the cost.

This assumes, of course, that ngmoco:) doesn’t discontinue the Egypt quest as well.

Big announcement tomorrow

Actually, I have a couple of announcements tomorrow, including a project I’m doing with the help of Acehound. I’m calling it the February project (that’s the code name) for reasons you’ll see then.

Several players have written comments or emailed me to ask my advice on the best buildings to buy for their kingdoms to get ahead. Before I answer that question I usually drop by to see what they’re doing.

One thing I’ve noticed is that novice players (and even experienced players) prefer to invest in one of each building rather than concentrating on multiple copies of the more lucrative buildings.

You can build an attractive kingdom and still focus on adding multiple copies of the more lucrative buildings. This layout is available by L6. Spend six dollars for three ice sculptor’s abodes and you will be able to attract repeat business. I didn’t add the abodes because I didn’t want to spend the money just to do this illustration.

Click image to see full size

I understand the reticence. Until you really study the leading players its easy to follow the model of the players you order from every day. When players do stumble onto kingdoms that concentrate shops, it’s easy to think they’re the players making the wrong move.

There are a couple of other reasons I can imagine.
A game is rarely defined by its rules. Those are merely the stepping stones for players to develop strategic responses. These responses include making the rules and guidelines work to their advantage, often in ways the games’ designers never intended. It takes a lot of practice for players to see the difference between strategic and ordinary moves.

Another reason is that players follow the game’s achievements lists, which basically take players through a basic set of moves for building their kingdoms. What many players never consider is this: You can take the achievements on at your own schedule. You can earn the coins and experience first, then fill in the shops for the achievements lists later.

Players begin to make moves up the leader board when they realize they don’t have to build their kingdoms based on the buildings available at each level. The real goal is to reach the level where they can purchase the buildings with the best return.

Unfortunately, I think a number of players are afraid to install six or seven mines or ponds‚Äîeven though the return per cost is better than many of the shops at higher levels‚Äîbecause they are afraid they will lose their money.

Players also seem to be extremely reluctant to sell back shops because they think it will cost them. They fail to understand a basic business principal that applies to this game: You have to spend coins to earn coins (and more experience).

Now that you can move buildings back to inventory, you shouldn’t have that fear anymore. When you finally reach a level where you need to install multiples of a better shop, you can move the older shops into inventory and put them in another realm later.

You should also remember, however, that every new shop you install also earns a lot of experience points up front. Items in inventory don’t add additional experience points. You will do even better to sell those old buildings off and add new buildings for the experience points.

Attracting customers

The number one reason why you should concentrate on multiples of the best shops rather than one of every shop is to attract customers. Players who want to move up in the game want the best return for their visit. If they know that your shop will have six viking ships and six medusa’s lairs that means they will have a better chance of finding a good shop than a kingdom with one of everything.

If you doubt this, think it through yourself. A young player orders from you so you return the order to keep her business. The player has several friends already and only ten different shops. Almost always the only open shops will be the mine and the lumberyard.

You return as soon as you get the notice that she returned your order, but the others remain filled. The odds are likely that you will not be able to place better orders, and the ones you can place just don’t return enough to make coming back again and again worth your while.

Another lower level player has four ice sculptor’s abodes, four cemeteries and four tailor shops in her kingdom. Which kingdom do you think is more likely to provide a higher paying return for your visit? Yes, this is a rhetorical question but even rhetorical questions have value when they remind you of what should be obvious.

Customers will go to the kingdoms with the better payoffs.

If you’re still not convinced, visit the leaders (and the leaders among your friends, whom you can also access from the leader board). You can look for two things:

How many copies of the better shops do they have?

What are customers ordering?

Most of the game leaders not only have tons of ruby groves, they also tend to concentrate their kingdoms on three or four shops. And these shops are almost always full.

The second question is probably more illuminating. In my experience, orders will always flock to the high value shops with only the occasional order being placed with the occasional lower valued shops placed for decoration or balance. The higher-return shops always get better traffic than the lower return shops.

Still pretty

I think young players may also be concerned that their kingdoms should have one of every kind of shop because they will look better. This isn’t necessarily true, at least later on as they reach higher levels and more decorative objects become available.

Great designers frequently repeat elements to create distinctive patterns and looks (and I will talk about this in the future). With thoughtful placement you can make a beautiful kingdom out of nothing but ponds, tailor shops, pine trees and roads.

If you don’t have multiples of one or more shops, but you do have some customers who drop by regularly, try an experiment for me. Invest in three of the most profitable shops available at your level before you add anything else. Make sure they really have a good total point and hourly payout.

If the customers gravitate toward the three shops, add another. You should find that the four copies of the same shop are always full and your other shops aren’t. This should be all the convincing you need.

If not, move the extras into inventory to use when you add new realms, and go back to the old way.

It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon and We Rule as well. But not the Stephens family who firmly believes that no crisis should be addressed until the holidays when it’s too late resolve the situation to anyone’s satisfaction. Usually we wait until Christmas, but this year one sister and her daughters are headed to Africa meaning this all has to be resolved by this week.

Fortunately, ngmoco:) only released new items on Monday so I didn’t have much to write about. Unfortunately, they didn’t bother to tell anybody so I waited until Friday to update charts that I could have finished on Tuesday.

Usually, family holiday crisis is perfect fodder for writing, but this time the fallout won’t end until well after the New Year and, depending on how the pieces fall, it could take another year before I can figure out how to make it funny. By then we will probably have moved onto to another game.

Still, there have been a couple of developments in We Rule worth commenting on this week, and by next week I hope to be back in full swing with more fun stuff to talk about.

Resurrecting old deals

This is the first time I completely missed the mark on predicting new product releases. I anticipated some kind of Thanksgiving oriented product, and ngmoco:) ignored the holiday altogether. I think the prediction was reasonable since they flooded the game with Halloween products of marginal value.

The Halloween-themed releases did put them in line with other games, such as Farmville and the eighty dozen Tap games (TapZoo, TapKitchen, TapCity, TapFish, etc. I didn’t bother to go back to check and see if I had the names exactly right; they’re mostly iPhone games anyway). And at least ngmoco:) didn’t put a countdown on special items the way other games do. But in spite of cornucopia houses and pilgrims’ huts in Farmville, We Rule stuck with Greek mythology.

This leaves Christmas a toss up. We could see a Yule Log, since that plays into the game’s original medieval theme, but how far the developers will go with the holidays remains to be seen. And the fact that ngmoco:) is now a Japanese company could also be an influencing factor. I’m not sure Jesus and Santa top the cultural charts in that part of the world.

They did, however, resurrect the fairy tree, unicorn’s meadow and broomstick hut. These have little commercial value anymore; there are better shops out at all levels with similar or better returns. But for L11 players, they do provide a decent payoff, and some of us have a sentimental attachment to one or more of them.

I was hoping the fairy trees would have fairies this time, but, no, the fairies are still hiding. A reader once promised to send a screenshot of a fairy. Hopefully they will send it soon.

If you love medieval magic, however, the fairy tree and unicorn’s meadow do help tie your kingdoms back to the roots of the game, and they do pay better than many of the older active shops. It wouldn’t hurt to decorate your kingdoms with one or more if you missed them the first time around.

What I am hoping is that this will become a trend, especially since We Farm brought back the aliens. It would be nice to know that if we need to remove an item, it will show back up once or twice a year should we change our minds later.

We Farm and We City grow up

We Farm and We City both added realms this week. We Farm seems to have gone off the deep end with their Safari mode, but We City is going international. This week they added some Japanese items, perhaps as an homage to their new owners.

Or under orders from their new owners.

If you’ve gotten bored and abandoned one or the other (as I had been tempted to) these moves might pique your interest. We City is also adding some high value items slowly but surely.

Mojo blowouts

I am posting this before the mojo sale ends hoping that a few of you will have a chance to read this in time.

I would never encourage players to buy or use mojo, but I will admit that I indulge. One of the main reasons I use mojo is to mature new properties fast so that I can have the return values to post online the day a shop becomes available. But, I will also admit that spending the money on mojo allows me to open more of the newer shops than I might otherwise.

I try to buy one shop with cash for every shop I buy with mojo, and, if I am flush with cash, I don’t use it for shops at all. And, if you’ve visited my kingdom, you know I buy diamond groves with mojo because that’s the only way you can buy them (again).

Still there are some mojo strategies you can follow.

Save your money and only buy mojo when it becomes available for a 25 percent discount (as opposed to the 20 percent discounts which they also offer). This usually happens once a month and never less often than every other month. Buy the 2000m cask if you can afford it, and the 800m flask if you can’t. These give you the most mojo for your hard dollar.

Only spend mojo when buildings and groves are also discounted. Unfortunately, ngmoco:) doesn’t always put both on sale at the same time. Most importantly, wait to plant diamonds until a 25 percent off sale. Because ngmoco:) can’t sell groves for 7.5m, they have to discount them by a full 30 percent.

This means that you can plant 14 groves for the price of 10. The savings increases because of the fractions involved. If you bought and spent 2000m you would be able to plant 285 groves, or 85 more than you would when the sales are gone.

I combined the 25% off mojo sale, plus the 25% off groves sale, to take advantage of a peculiar number. Reducing diamond groves by 25% forces them to round down to a 30% discount (from 10m to 7m). In essence this cuts the total real dollar cost of diamond groves by half, or from 5¢ for one grove to a fraction over 5¢ for two. This makes it more cost effective for me to replace a stack of ruby groves with a stack of diamonds, reducing the real dollar cost to replace 35 rubies from $1.75 to 91¢.

Click image to see full size

Let’s put this back in a real dollar perspective, however. If you took advantage of the mojo sale, and waited for the building sale, you still spent $75 for those 285 groves. That’s a hell of a lot of money for a game.¢

Stacking mystery deepens

John Wagner, the publicist for ngmoco:) posted a comment on this site that nobody has been banned for life from We Rule. I think we should take him at his word. I did my best to verify that the player who claimed to be banned was actually banned. His kingdom was gone, but it is possible something else happened.

I’ve asked both the player and Wagner for further details, but since this week was a holiday, I doubt we will hear officially for a while. My advice: Stay within the limits I posted last week for now (or close to them) if you haven’t reached them already.

If you have passed them, don’t get honest like I did and remove them. At least not until you hear something official.

I’ve decided to go with more constant abbreviated references. In this column and the future I will be referring to coins, mojo and experience as:

c = coins

m = mojo

xp = experience points

You will probably have already noticed the addition of the Bizarro Tower of Light (aka the Dark Castle) since I posted this blog this morning. It really is the mirror of the Tower of Light (including installation cost) except it’s dark, comes with rubies instead of diamonds, and the coin and experience values are reversed. Get it? Because it’s evil you earn more money but less goodness (xp). If they really got their mythology right it would be twice as many coins but negative experience points (630c and -200xp).

Maybe if we put them in the same realm the witch and the angel will cancel each other out.

So will we see a head on battle between the light lady and the evil sorceress? Light lady’s been hiding since I installed the dark castle on the opposite end of my east realm. And the sorceress got a bigger picture on the splash screen introducing new objects.

Click image to see full size

My real reason to add this is because any comments about the Tower of Light in today’s post also apply to the Dark Kingdom.

Oh, yes, and most of the houses (except orange) have slowed down from returning every fifteen minutes to every three hours. Just to keep you confused.

You may have experience some confusion about the recent upgrade to We Rule Quests, and I, for one, have unwittingly contributed to the confusion. In addition, ngmoco:) has—at least for now—realized players didn’t want quests so much as the ability to move and store objects, and the ability to pay for diamond trees with something other than mojo.

Here’s where I was wrong: you can stack, you will be able to buy diamonds with coins (for a while), the quests aren’t quite as stupid as I suggested, and you will be able to move objects between realms.

You may also have noticed that houses pay off every fifteen minutes now. This is good news for new players with few resources to earn investment coins. In addition, you can download other games for coins (not all of them may be free), so this will also help build your account.

So let’s start the retraction process.

I shouldn’t really call it retraction because the only item I was really wrong about was stacking. The other three had been true when I wrote them. I guess the loud complaints from disappointed players, who weren’t quite as pacified by the quests as ngmoco:) thought, finally got through.

Slightly cooler quests

Let’s start with quests. The rewards are improving. I’ve earned them all so far, but the only ones I really like are the thrones.

I take that back. I didn’t do rock, paper, scissors because I would have lost coins and experience points while three high-paying shops were tied up so I could could earn the equivalent of spare change in coins and experience points. In fact, even beginning players are better off ordering from the high value shops than the total return they will earn from the quest.

As I wrote before, however, the thrones are kind of cool. If ngmoco:) had thought to add a king to the throne like they did with the queen, the first throne would have been even cooler. So hopefully they’ll add the king later or allow us to conduct another quest for a throne with a king.

I haven’t changed my assessment of the quests themselves. They need to add newer and more high value purchases to the quests. It’s not worth it to me to reinstall a watchtower or a butcher shop so people can quest. But Carol still has some of the older stuff at JennyManytoes and its vassal kingdom ptsringer (don’t blame her for the name because I set it up and let her take over).

Stacking

Contrary to my previous announcement, you can stack. You just can’t stack while you’re installing items like you could before. This was a dicey proposition at best, usually allowing players to stack three items at once, and occasionally as many as six or seven. But that method is gone.

There’s so much to the stacking question that I’m going to hold off until next week to devote the entire blog to it. So I’ll drop that subject for now.

Storage

A number of players were disappointed when the ability to move objects wasn’t released with the official upgrade. To add to their anger, word got out of a a notice posted on the ngmoco:) support page:

“Due to technical limitations of We Rule at this time we are not planning to implement the ability to move items between realms. It may or may not be possible in the future. Thanks for your feedback and feature requests.”

It turns out this notice (in a tiny, tiny font size with light gray text) was posted last August, but word didn’t get out until after We Rule Quests arrived. Ironically, about the time word got out, the Tower of Light appeared. Once players built it, many discovered they could remove it and return it to inventory.

The catch, there’s always a catch, is that you can’t earn coins or buy mojo to purchase the new tower. You have to buy it for real dollars.

So we will be able to move and store objects. What we don’t know, and probably won’t know for a while, is whether or not ngmoco:) will go back to make all buildings moveable or whether this will be for special “pay for cash” buildings only. The fact the the mermaid isle can be purchased for coins or mojo but can’t be moved back into inventory makes it more likely that the option will be for cash items only.

The question now is whether ngmoco:) is making a move towards making all new buildings moveable and pay only, or will they be releasing both types of buildings. I don’t like either option, but since I liked the mermaids better than the tower, I would prefer the former.

Better yet, just release a five dollar version of We Rule where all our objects are movable, including the older ones. I would pay five dollars for that and it would give players the option.

What I really want to discuss is diamond groves, which became available for 100,000c on Thursday (along with diamond roads). For many players this may seem like a good thing, and I originally thought so. But now I’m not so sure.

Are diamond groves worth the investment?

You can now purchase diamond trees with coins. And ngmoco:) very reasonably settled on my original suggestion for a price, $100K in coins. This means they followed up on two thirds of my campaign for diamond trees—the ability to plant groves and (at least temporarily since they say the offer will be discontinued soon) the ability to purchase them for a $100K.

I hate to complain, but they missed the most important part of the suggestion, that if the price increases by ten times the price of rubies, so should the pay out. I originally suggested a reward of 1000 coins (c) and 850 xp every six hours.

Unfortunately, in spite of the high price in coins, the payout for diamond groves hasn’t increased and remains the same as before at 120c and 105xp.

I suggest you seriously think before you pay the coin price on diamonds. The return for the same 100,000c investment in ruby groves is 1000c and 850xp. which is substantial. The trade-off is in real estate. Ten ruby groves occupy ten times the space. So the payout for ten spaces is 1000c and 850xp for rubies verses 12000c and 105o0xp (about 2000 more for each).

But that’s comparing one diamond to one ruby. If you look at the total investment price, the payout difference for the same investment is 1000c and and 850xp every six hours for rubies verses 120 and 105 for diamonds.

For those of you who can afford the mojo, the decision is obvious, investing 10m for the diamond grove will pay off much better than than investing 8m for the rubies. I would even suggest replacing rubies with diamonds if you have real money to burn.1

I could run a Kindometrics analysis on the groves to tell you what the long term payout differences are, and I may even do so one of these days and add it to the analysis section. But I did run a quick calculation and it will take 208 days (harvesting every six hours), or almost seven months, for your diamond grove to start turning a profit. If you harvest three times a day you’re looking at more than nine months to return an investment for what will become a twenty percent increase on the return from a ruby grove.

Oh, what the hell. Let’s at least project investment and earnings over a year. And for a really dramatic comparison, lets compare the costs and earnings for one grove versus those for planting ten.

I ran a sample comparison of investment costs and profit for one and ten ruby and diamond groves. As you can see, even though the diamond grove is more profitable in the long run, it will take four years to recoup the money you would have lost by investing in a ruby grove.

Click image to see full size

The numbers indicate that you will earn far more from the ruby grove than the diamond grove at least in the immediate, and even near long-term future. Why? Because the difference in earning (about 20,000c more per year) is lost in the difference in the increased investment cost. We’re talking more than four years for the diamond grove to pay off the difference in profits and start outproducing the ruby grove.

I’m basing these profit numbers on the assumption that you will harvest your groves three times a day because you don’t want to get up in the middle of the night to harvest every cycle. Even if you do four harvests a day, the numbers won’t change significantly, except to speed up the payoff by a year.

That’s assuming, of course, that you really want to spend the next three years harvesting diamonds every six hours.

Here’s another way to look at it. The mojo cost of a diamond is 25 percent more than the mojo cost of a ruby. The coin cost of a diamond grove is ten times the cost of a ruby, or a thousand percent more.

If you’re still playing in four years, however,2 those diamonds will really start to pay off.

Let it snow, let it snow

We didn’t get snow tiles like the bridge tiles, which was another priority on my upgrade wish list. But the diamond roads come close. When you cover the ground around buildings, they resemble glistening snow. It’s a pain to actually pave ground with diamond roads (or any roads for that matter) and then place and move buildings around on top of them. I can’t begin to describe how big a pain it is; you’ll just have to wait until you have to move six roads to select a building. But they are pretty.

Best of all, We Rule Quests now lets you drop roads and bridges beneath buildings (and partially beneath buildings) you already placed. In the past you had to lay the pavement and move the buildings on top.

I still want pure white square tiles, but these are close. I’ve already seen some great stuff. Happy decorating.

This is perhaps the best example of diamond decorating I’ve seen so far. Notice how he/she noticed those were diamonds spilling from the Tower of Light and has them pouring onto the ground? You’ll see more of this kingdom (and I’ll tell you who it is) next week.

Click image to see full size

No, Virginia, there is no more We Rule

Most of you noticed this, but a couple of players have written so let me make it official: You have to upgrade to We Rule Quest.Any version of We Rule you might have on your iPad or iPhone has been crippled by ngmoco:). To the best of my knowledge this one wasn’t ngmoco:)’s decision, it was a consequence of Apple’s new interface guidelines.

By the way, did you know that “redux” isn’t pronounced to rhyme with “ducks”, but with “dew”? (It’s in the title, in case you’d forgotten). Actually, it’s French so the closest American pronunciation would be “ray-dyu” with something between the “uh” and “oo” sound. This isn’t going to help you play We Rule better but if you run into one of those pseudo-intellectual jerks who insist on correcting you and they just happen to say, “reduces,” you will have the perfect gotcha moment.

1Which most of us don’t. But with the new Congress those of you who can afford mojo will be able to afford a lot more of it before the 2012 elections, and those of us who can’t will probably not even have the money to contribute to our favorite candidates even more.back

Charts beneath blog. Now include L9 Jack 0’Lantern, correct charts and some strange bogies (“/”) I can’t eliminate.
Two major developments this weekend:

Number 2:

Aeroship became the first player to cross one hundred million points in We Rule. I’m so happy for him because I crossed twenty million and I’m even further behind. Still, who would have thought anyone would have the patience to collect that much digital swag?

100 million points. More importantly, how the hell did he stack all those vintage chateau’s? How will we touch one to order? (touch to enlarge)

Number 1:

We got diamond groves. All of the comments were so happy that they “listened to us” that I didn’t want to spoil the party with a more objective anaylisis. I do tend to find a storm cloud in every silver lining, and since readers don’t get to make decisions about game design, why push the downer on them.

Buy after all of the celebratory comments, Pvac1138 had to deflate the balloon by pointing out the diamond groves only give out 150c and 105xp and, you have to buy them with mojo. There’s a lot of subtext here, so lest you think this is a knee-jerk reaction…

Wait, let’s examine the subtext behind “knee-jerk reaction,” for this phrase in and of itself can be peeled away layer by subtextual layer. “Knee-jerk reaction” is in fact a metaphor for someone who reacts to stimulus without thinking. But the contextual development of the metaphor was reflex testing in which a doctor would strike a patient in the knee with a hammer to see if his “knee would jerk.”

In fact a knee-jerk reaction is a good thing because it means the body is prepared to respond to external stimulus and possible harm. The patients who don’t have a knee jerk reaction are the ones who need medical assistance.

So this knee-jerk reaction is the body’s and mind’s ability to react quickly in response to physical information. It is a smart move, not a dumb move.

Subtextual layer two: I originally started the posts at get satisfaction requesting diamond groves, so I should be happy we got them. But there was a rather large contextual plane being developed to support the diamond grove not as a decorative object but a way to change the strategy of the game.

Beneath the surface plane, a strategic game structure to allow more players access to non-mojo game artifacts. The diamond was seen metaphorically as the most valuable gem, in fact worth ten times as much as rubies. So we were hoping to get a grove that was very expensive with an extremely high return (100,000c to buy delivers 1000 coins and 850xp). And not have to buy it with mojo.

Are we happy to see the diamond tree? Absolutely. Will it improve the color palette or our kingdoms? Absolutely. Do we now want a crystal clear star diamond grove that costs 100K and gives 1500c and 1050 xp? Even more absolutely, even though “even more” is superfluous since you can’t be more absolute than absolute.

We also learned why things have been a little crazy on our farms, kingdoms and cities. The Gojira of Japanese game companies, DeNA, snatched up ngmoco:) and the plus+ game network.

You could see the confusion too. One week after the alien invasion of We Farm, deputy Andy drives into town to drive them off. In fact, we also get a country schoolhouse and a still.

Sure, they can call it a root beer brewery but I know enough about both to know that’s a still. Probably made with alien technology.

Then we get our shops in erector sets in We Rule. First we get the buildings, then we get the people. That’s right, the vinter woman was a last minute after thought. Which makes me wonder, if they can add her after the fact, When are we going to see the fairies?

For that matter, when do the college professors get their extreme makeovers? I saw three of them together and they just look wrong. They look like the kids the real brothers beat the crap out of after school. “Wear our colors, m____ f____? Watch us pound your round white glasses up your fat black….” I don’t think I need to explain further.

The brothers need a makeover before they get a beat over.

Crop crunching and bean counting

It’s interesting that Tammy posted a comment about crops since I had just decided to get off my ass and post a crops analysis for this week’s blog.

I had dithered on a farming analysis because running the numbers on crops is far more complex than running the numbers on buildings. You not only have to decide how much the crop is worth, you have to decide how much your time is worth. Crops involve something I call the babysitting factor.

The babysitting factor boils down to how much time you’re willing to invest to earn money from your crops. Typically the best returners harvest in very little time. Which means you have to invest more time in the game.

I don’t know about you, but I want to spend less time harvesting crops, not more. So the question is not, do I want to plant longer harvesting crops, the question is how much am I willing to lose to save my precious time?

I’ve tried a number of methods to analyze the numbers, but the best I have been able to do is make it easier to find the patterns, not draw them clearly from the data. And I have created dozens of charts which I think will be more confusing, not less, to people who don’t inhabit my head.

Since the people that already inhabit my head make life difficult to get along with, I don’t think any of my readers would want to join the crowd. So I’ll do the best I can.

You really need to think of farming as two different enterprises. The long-term regularly scheduled enterprise, and the special harvests for special situations.

As a rule you don’t need to think about experience points. With a couple of exceptions, which I will note, they tend to run about the same ratio to coins with all of the crops. So a higher coin return will tend to have a slightly higher experience return.

Mix crops?

The one policy I don’t advocate is hedging bets by mixing crops. Not only do you need to be an accounting whiz to predict the optimal mix of crops, you have to juggle multiple schedules. For most players it’s easier to develop a routine schedule and stick to it.

Low maintenance crop schedules

Sooner or later you will want to develop a fairly low-maintenance crop schedule. Farming is no fun, and figuring out which crops to plant less so. So they key is to decide which crops manage themselves most profitably.

Once players reach L17 they earn magic cauliflower and for most players that will be their staple crop for the rest of the game. The question is, now that it takes thirteenhours to harvest, what should we plant for the other eleven?

Rather than trying to fill every free hour, I look to pair one other crop that will provide the best return in the long run.

Cauliflower doesn’t provide the best cash return per hour, but it provides the best return of plants that aren’t high maintenance, with 100c and 27xp an hour. Yes, the net profit for the 13 hours is lower than if you were to plant bamboo, eggplant, tomato or peas. But you don’t have to devote time to those crops either. This makes it the perfect overnight crop.

The question is what crops to plant in the remaining 11 hours. This will depend on your level. At L40 I basically do one cauliflower planting overnight, and three blackberry plantings during the day. Blackberries deliver 500xp with every harvest. With 23 fields and 3 harvests my farms can generate 34,500xp a day.

So in one day my cauliflower generates 30000c and 8000xp, the blackberries deliver a piddling 575c and 34,500xp. That’s 30,000+c and 42,000+xp every day.

Depending on your current level, you should study the charts to find the best partner for your cauliflower because it will change as more crops become available. But some crops are good low maintenance performers and others are dogs.

Once you earn the magic cauliflower you might look at pairing the following crops as you reach different levls (the coin totals are net coins earned):

Peppers (L16): 255c and 105xp in 11 hrs.

Oats (L21) 240c and 100xp in 9 hrs.

Honeydew (L27) 550c and 125xp in 9 hrs.

The following deliver less cash than the honeydew but far more experience:

Dragon fruit (L32) 450c and 200xp in 6.67 hrs.

Grapes (L34) 450c and 575 in 6 hours.

The following require a little more effort but can harvested at least twice in the 11 hours before the evening’s cauliflower planting.

Lavender (L37) 525c and 145xp in 4 hrs (2 harvests double the return of the single honeydew harvest in 9 hours.)

Blackberries (L28) 500xp in 3.33 hours, or 1500xp in three harvests between cauliflower plantings.

This list is based on the low maintenance assumption that you only want to perform two harvests a day, not that you want to do three or four plantings each with different harvesting intervals.

But I can’t get the cauliflower

When you reach L11 you’ll be so happy to see the magic asparagus that you won’t care about the cauliflower. Each field delivers a net of 800c in 13 hours while you sleep. Multiply that by eight fields and you’ll feel rich every morning. Just don’t forget to save 400c for every field or you won’t be able to plant those asparagus again. If you want to remain low maintenance during the day, you could plant potatoes because they won’t spoil before it’s time to plant more asparagus. But I think you should be a little more high maintenance this early in the game, so at least do a round of potatoes and a round of pumpkings (better yet, four separate plantings of onions).

Before L11, I would go with potatoes overnight because they don’t spoil easily and pumpkins and strawberries during the day. Your farm is new and you need to put some time in the fields.

Overall winners

There was a time when the choice was easy. Magic cauliflower (L17) delivered 1300c and 350xp every twelve hours. Before that the Magic Asparagus delivered 800c and 250xp every twelve hours once you reached L11. You could do your morning and evening harvest and get a really decent return.

Then ngmoco:) ruined our delightful harvesting schedule with the digital equivalent of global warming. Players were doing very well, incomes were raising the temperature of the game, so they cooled things down by stretching the harvest schedule. Harvests went from every 15, 20, 30 and 60 minutes to 12, 18, 24, 36 and 70. By breaking away from a schedule that works with familiar day-to-day schedules, they really screwed us.

Nonetheless, a few crops stand out for delivering special values:

Best hourly return: No getting around it, corn, at $400 per field per hour. They turn around every seven seconds, so expect some carpal tunnels.

When I needed money and experience fast before L30 I would spend many evenings turning over corn fields, only stopping to plant wheat when I needed to go to the bathroom or grab a beer from the refrigerator.

Best cash return short term:Bamboo at $333 per hour per field every 45 minutes. Even if you harvest every hour, you still make a killing.

Best cash return medium term: Lavender at $131 per field per hour over 4hrs. This makes it a good compromize investment. It’s the best cash return for any crop that harvests in more than four hours.

Best cash returns for lower levels: Onions give you $100 per field per hour from L3 on. The 23 and 46 minute crops pay more, but an hour gives you time to do real stuff before returning to the game. The shorter intervals pretty much ruin your ability to think about other tasks.

Best return for cash and experience: Cat whiskers blossom fast at 12 minutes and spoil just as fast, but if you can take the time to groom them they return $225 and 225xp per field per hour.

Once I hit L30 my corn nights were gone. My ruby groves outperformed my crops by a large margin. So if I needed an additional quick cash and experience boost like the old days, I turned to cat whiskers. I could set my alarm for 12 minutes, harvest and plant my cat whiskers and grab the free coins from the promotions if they were available. I couldn’t work on my blogs productively, but sometimes you make sacrifices for what’s really important.

Best overnight returns: Cauliflower (L17). But I’ve discussed this at length.

Least likely to die: Sunflowers (L34). At $20 per field per hour the return is terrible (in a tie with carrots for fifth worst hourly return). But if you need to spend some time away from the game, or just get tired of planting, these won’t spoil for several days and scare customers away.

Overall Losers

Beans at $13.60 per hour in 25 hours.

Artichokes and Cotton at $16 per hour in 20 and 25 hours.

Watermelon at $16.67 per hour in 18 hours.

Pineapples at $19.06 per hour in 16 hours.

Carrots at $20 an hour in 13 hours.

Harvesting with Mojo

What about harvesting with mojo? With a couple of exceptions, I wouldn’t do it, and I would never do it at the higher levels. Mojo is expensive and the more fields you have, the more it adds up. For instance, lets say you spend two each to harvest six fields when you’re L12. That’s 12 mojo. With 23 fields at L40, you’re looking at 46 mojo, which is a bundle by any means.

Now let’s put both in perspective. Twelve mojo you don’t spend at L12 is a chocolate shop you can buy and that will generate 320 coins and 120 xp every day, even if it sits there doing nothing. Or you can save the mojo and buy one ruby tree later on. You can keep collecting 100 cash and 85 experience points every six hours after that. At L40 you can buy four diamond trees, which, again, will produce 150 and 105xp as long as you have them. Or you can buy a vintage chateau (40m) and earn $1500-2000 every three days (I don’t have the numbers yet and probably won’t for a couple of weeks since all six of my chateaus are always booked)

Economically, you’re better off with constant and larger return from buildings or groves.

However, if you’re trying to get to a new lower level and you feel you have to burn mojo on crops this is what I would do. Pumpkins, which normally harvest in three hours are the highest returning crop that you can harvest with a single mojo. One mojo will produce a return of $160 and 65xp. If you look to plants with higher mojo to buy out, expenses begin to escalate.

Let’s say you’re in a hurry to jump to L10 so you can expand your castle
With six farms of pumpkins, six mojo will net 960c and 390xp. Seven pumpkin harvests will generate the experience points you need and more than enough cash to generate the level 10 land and castle upgrade. Those seven harvests will require an investment of 42 mojo, which will mean a $10 purchase. Ten real electronic dollars.

And again, I want to stress that the coin and experience return is one time only. You will not be creating anything to build for the future.

I’m not going to try to talk you out of a mojo level jump from L9 to L10. But let’s review those numbers at 19 to 20. You now need 33,500xp to make the leap, about 12 times more than the leap from 9 to 10. The mojo cost will be 515, and now you’re looking at fifty dollars to buy a mojo flask.

Is it worth fifty dollars for a one-time mojo splurge that will do noting other than get you to the immediate goal?

By comparison, 515 mojo would buy you 51 diamond trees, which would generate $23K and 16K xp every day. In three days you could buy a magic emporium and now both will generate income. In less than two weeks you could buy the new vintage chateau, which earns 3K in coins whenever someone places an order. And your diamond trees are still coughing up the money.

What if I plant the wrong crop?

Sell the farm, don’t harvest with mojo. You will lose 225c (the price of the farm less the ten percent sell back price) but you won’t lose the mojo. If the return on the crop you intended to plant is less than the cost of the farm, let the current crop rot or wait until it harvests and plant something else that can be harvested in approximately the same amount of time as the time remaining on the crops you do want.

It’s easy to think, what’s one mojo for a field of wheat (or even cat whiskers?). Think that ten times and you’re out a diamond tree again.

Truthfully, crops diminish in importance as you kingdom grows. But if you plant smart, you’ll move through the levels more quickly.